ZeroVM: Smaller, Lighter, Faster

Developers have been buzzing lately about how virtualization containers can boost scale while lowering costs. We are big fans of containers and the ways that they simplify the deployment and management of cloud applications. We think the next step is containerizing and virtualizing the application, not just the machine.

Today, we acquired ZeroVM, a lightweight open-source hypervisor created by LiteStack and built to run cloud applications. ZeroVM breaks down the barriers between compute and storage. Where traditional cloud architectures have needed to move the data to the app for processing, ZeroVM flips that approach and moves the app to the data. This dramatically increases speed of access and decreases latency.

ZeroVM is efficient because it is made to virtualize applications, not machines. The runtime virtualizes only the server parts that do the actual work at hand – making it much faster. Today, the fastest virtual servers take at least two minutes to create, while ZeroVM takes less than 5 milliseconds – or 1/20,000th as long. ZeroVM is fast enough that you can put every request into its own mini-VM to spread horizontally.

Making things smaller, lighter and faster also provides greater security. ZeroVM is fast enough to isolate each individual user in a separate container, which delivers greater granularity of security and control.

An optimization expert once said something to the effect that “You can’t make computers go faster; you can only make them do less.” That’s the value of ZeroVM.

We believe the future of computing is smaller, lighter and faster. We see great potential in ZeroVM and the community around it, led by Camuel Gilyadov, Constantine Perespykin and their eight-member team. We are excited to welcome the ZeroVM team and community to the Rackspace family.

Stay tuned for a publicly accessible preview showing what a converged data and compute layer can do.

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Van Lindberg served as Vice President and Associate General Counsel for Rackspace, where he served in both legal and technical roles, until 2017.
As associate general counsel, Lindberg oversaw the Intellectual Property program, directing Rackspace's strategy and policy around patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret and open source matters. He also headed Rackspace's patent reform lobbying efforts.
On the technical side, Lindberg co-chaired the company’s Technical Career Track program, or TCT, a leadership development program for the most highly skilled technical Rackers. He offered technical strategy and ecosystem engagement, identified emerging technologies, separating out differentiating versus non-differentiating product elements and using open source strategies to be more competitive.
Previously, Lindberg worked for the international corporate law firm Haynes and Boone, LLP, where he wrote "Intellectual Property and Open Source,” and grew the firm's open source practice. He also did intellectual property transactional work, patent prosecution, litigation and post-grant actions (ex parte and inter partes reexams/reviews).
In 2012, the American Bar Association Journal named him one of "America's Top 12 Techiest Attorneys."
Lindberg served on the board of the Python Software Foundation, the board of the OpenStack Foundation, and was the first chair of the Docker Governance Advisory Board.

now imagine a hybrid cloud, with zeroVM instances, where you pay only for execution time! 100000 request came in one second. 5ms and you have 100k instances on hybrid cloud to execute your video trans-coding, or whatever heavy procedure you have in there! and those vm’s would be started from one image, which would only contain runtimes and your piece of code! instant scaling, pay-as-you-use, marvelous!